Energy Makes Energy

My first summer intensive experience was the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, a two-week auditioned program for Oklahoma teenagers involved in the arts. It is held at Quartz Mountain State Park in southwestern Oklahoma each June, and is a hybrid of summer intensive and summer camp. While now they have pavilions that house the various disciplines, and a lovely performance space, when I attended it was still a fairly young program and the set-up for classes was very much a “make it work” type of situation.

The hub of the activities was the lodge, which consisted of a hotel, restaurant, gift shop, indoor swimming pool, and meeting rooms. Students didn’t stay in the hotel with faculty and staff; we were housed in cabins and group camp buildings located some distance away, with camp counselors as chaperones. Each morning, we were bused in, as all meals and most classes took place either in or near the lodge. The artistic disciplines when I attended included acting, mime, writing, photography, visual arts, orchestra, ballet, and modern dance.

The days were long. Mornings and afternoons were spent studying your discipline, and then in the evenings there were activities and events that everyone attended so they could learn about other art forms. Wednesday and Saturday of both weeks, there were orchestra concerts. Other nights there were a couple of options that we could choose between. Guest artists or faculty members would speak or perform, and sometimes, the students might also be involved in a lecture-demo of some sort.

This exposure to many different art forms and types of artists is what makes OSAI different from a traditional dance intensive, where the focus is only on one thing. As a teen developing my identity and voice, this exposure encouraged me to look beyond my own art form for inspiration and ways to know and understand the world. Through conversations with peers who were musicians, actors, writers, painters, I came to realize that my “tribe” was much larger than I had previously known, and consisted of more than just dancers.

My first summer, when I was 13, I was selected to attend OSAI in modern dance. Our “studio” was the tennis court – net removed, a sprung(ish) floor laid out, and a tent-top erected over the flooring to provide shade. The weather was bearable first thing in the morning when class started, but by afternoon the heat could be brutal. I remember being very jealous of the ballet dancers, because their classroom space was inside, atop the covered swimming pool.

That year there were also a lot of thunderstorms that would come through in the afternoons that prevented us from dancing outside. There wasn’t an alternate space on-site, so a few times we were bused to a nearby town so we could use their high school gymnasium. I was given a solo in the choreography for the final performance, and I actually learned the majority of it in the lodge’s narrow hotel hallway because of bad weather.

The modern dance teacher that summer was Nora Guthrie, daughter of Woody and sister of Arlo. There were several from my home studio attending OSAI that year, some in modern and some in ballet, and the ballet teacher was Georgina Parkinson from the Royal Ballet, at that time a ballet mistress with American Ballet Theatre – elegant and imperious, with a crisp British accent. By contrast, Nora was earthy, with a quick bird-like way of moving…and also imperious. (It might be a dance teacher trait.) She was a great teacher. I hadn’t really had any formal modern dance training at that time, but she was so clear with her instructions and expectations that I very quickly felt like I understood the concepts and ideas that she was imparting. Her choreography was cool and interesting, and she made it feel completely organic to me.

The aforementioned long days meant that mornings were difficult – everyone was tired and sore, so getting going at the beginning of class was somewhat of a chore. The aforementioned weather disturbances meant that afternoons were also difficult – either it was so hot in our outdoor studio that our muscles seemed to melt in lethargy, or storms had us traveling to an alternate location, the bus spitting us out completely distracted, with cold, stiff muscles. From a teacher/choreographer perspective, these are definitely not ideal circumstances either, and I’m sure that Nora was hot, sore, tired, and distracted as well. But she never let on, and continued in her demanding, yet positive way, to push us to learn, to dance bigger and better…and she choreographed a solo in a hallway.

As you can tell, I have a lot of memories from this first formative experience, but one of the most important lessons I learned from Nora Guthrie was when she said this, one morning class when everyone was tired and moving slow: “Energy makes energy. When you are tired, make the decision to take your first step with as much energy as you have, and you’ll find that each step after that becomes easier, because….Energy. Makes. Energy.”

We all discovered it was true that morning. And I have spoken these words to my own students…and reminded myself of their importance, as well…more times than I can count in the intervening years.